NEWPORT County AFC manager Michael Flynn admits his side are desperate for three points after suffering a fourth successive League Two defeat on Saturday.

James Vaughan’s second-half penalty, after an under-hit back-pass from defender Ryan Inniss, sealed a 1-0 win for hosts Bradford City at Valley Parade and saw County drop to 12th in the table after 18 games.

Flynn will hope to end the worst run of results of his managerial career over the next two weeks when his team take on bottom two Stevenage and Morecambe.

Asked if they need a win, the Exiles boss said: “Of course we do. We want to win every game.

“Don’t think I’ve gone to Bradford thinking ‘it doesn’t matter if we don’t win this’ – that’s a load of rubbish.

“We had a lot of fans come up a long way and I thought they were brilliant travelling that far to support the team.

“It’s a good stadium to play in, with a lot of spectators, but don’t think I was writing it off – I wanted to win and I’m just frustrated that we came away with nothing.”

South Wales Argus:

Flynn’s men are four points below seventh-placed Northampton Town with two games in hand and the manager is hopeful that a lengthy injury list will ease over the next week.

County were without Mickey Demetriou, Dan Leadbitter, Scot Bennett, Joss Labadie, Robbie Willmott, Ade Azeez and Keanu Marsh-Brown on Saturday.

“We’ll have to have a look,” said Flynn. “There are a couple who are close.

“We lost Robbie in the warm-up, which didn’t help.

“He was ready; we had all the data and he’s done all the rehab, but he’s had a recurrence of the calf strain.

“It affected our plans because we had to change three different things and stuff we worked on [went out of the window].

“It’s not ideal, but I’m not using that as an excuse because I thought we did very well in the first half.

“We gave them a soft goal and Nick [Townsend] made two great saves [after that] but we were chasing it then.”

Demetriou and Labadie both travelled to Bradford with the squad and were running on the pitch before kick-off, but Flynn says he won’t rush them back.

“They’re close, but I’m not going to put any time limit on it because we’ve seen what’s happened with Robbie,” he said.

“It’s close, but we’ll have to make sure.

“We could do with them back. I had four kids on the bench, but I can’t affect that so I’m not going to worry about it too much.

“Is it frustrating? Yes, but we had a depleted squad and near enough held our own against a team who I think will be in the top three [at the end of the season].

"We held our own and we [only] lost the game because of a big mistake."c